


the company house

by 8611



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spy, F/F, M/M, SHIELD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 05:42:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They only seem to see each other when they're bruised and bleeding and broken, but they're ok. (spy!au, with a side of SHIELD.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the company house

Scott goes to Hong Kong, and Vienna, and Mumbai, and Moscow. 

Shit always goes sideways and pear shaped in Moscow for Scott. He always seems to get shot, no matter how hard he tries to not get shot. And Scott is quite proud of his ‘not getting shot’ record. 

Except for Moscow. He has no idea what it is, it’s like a giant pit of suck re: his not getting shot skills. 

He drags his bleeding ass back to the safe house he’s using, one hand clutching a half empty bottle of Stolichnaya, the other pressed to the fingerprint reader that clicks and chirps green and lets him in. 

He staggers a bit, slumps against the wall, and pulls back his coat far enough to dump more vodka on the seeping bullet wound, groaning at the sharp pain on top of the dull ache. 

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Scott looks up to see Stiles sitting on the sleek couch (it’s leather, the agency likes decorating with leather), arms draped over the back of it and knees slouched apart. Wide. It’s an invitation, although Stiles’ face has taken on a twist of something else, and he gets up, peeling Scott out of his coat and going to his knees to work at the angry hole in Scott’s abdomen. 

“Hospital?” Stiles asks, and Scott shakes his head, scoffs. 

“Fuck no, you’nsane?” 

“First aid kit?”

“Kitchen.”

Scott ends up falling into the tub in the bathroom while attempting to get his shirt off, legs over the edge and head tipped back against the wall. The bottle spins on the smooth tub bottom and spills what’s left of its contents down the drain. 

“Stop wasting good vodka,” Stiles says as he drops the black case on the counter and starts going through it. It’s an agency kit, so first aid might not be strictly the correct thing to call it. Bit of an understatement, really. 

“S’ just ok vodka,” Scott says, and Stiles helps him out of the tub, laying him out on the floor, half on the bath mat and half off. Stiles straddles him and then takes a lethal looking pair of forceps to dig around in Scott’s insides, making him keen and arch his back, spine cracking, sharp as steel. Stiles holds him down with one deceptively strong hand and they’ve done this enough (it’s always Moscow, fucking Moscow) that Scott knows to try to stay still. 

“Anythin’ major?” Scott asks, and Stiles shakes his head as he drops bullet fragments into a shot glass. They make clean little clinking noises, metal on glass. 

“I don’t see any major bleeding like you nicked anything important, although it grazed your iliac crest. It’ll heal.”

Scott knows it will, because Scott knows all the little places you can shoot or stabs someone and let them live. He’s good at that himself. 

Stiles stiches and bandages and leaves him back out on the couch before coming back with two tumblers of the rakija in the cabinet that Scott had noticed that morning. It was in an unmarked bottle, homemade, probably left by the last agent who came through, going east from a job in Serbia or Bulgaria or Croatia or somewhere over there. 

It’s an unspoken rule in the agency: leave the liquor cabinet of the safe houses stocked. They’re not supposed to drink on the job, but it’s a simple thing, burning down your throat when your head is shattered and cracked from the bullet you’ve just sent at someone. 

Scott likes rakija. It reminds him of the three months, the three simple, gorgeous months, he spent hiding from the world in a rural Serbian town in the mountains. The people were friendly, the food was good, and the alcohol was plenty. Scott would have liked to stay there, he thinks sometimes, when it’s late and fuzzy and his memory is like smoke curling from someone’s (Allison’s) lips. 

Even though he’s drunk off his ass and probably just a little bit in shock, they still end up lips on lips, Stiles precise and laser guided, Scott smooth and slipping, splayed across Stiles’ lap. 

(Scott was drunk and Stiles was sober the first time they did this too, but Stiles was bloodier that time.)

Stiles digs his fingers into Scott’s good hip to make him squirm and gasp into Stiles’ open mouth, and they end up on the floor, carpet rough at Scott’s back and the ache in his side pulsing and stabbing in time to Stiles’ rhythm. 

He wakes up hung over and without Stiles, but that’s not surprising. Stiles moves fast – live fast, die young, he says, grinning, like he’s quoting something but Scott can never figure out what exactly it is. 

Outside is grey with sleet and rain and as Scott watches a train streak by he knows it’s time to move on. 

\---

Scott never thought he’d be here, when he was young and angry and his punches swung too far and too wide and Allison laughed at him, pleased, not malicious. 

He never gave any of it a second thought, it wasn’t worth it. Stiles did, he knows Stiles thinks a lot (too much) and that there’s something that’s eating at him, like maybe it wasn’t fully his choice. 

Still, as he’s sitting at a café in Istanbul, coffee untouched in front of him, he has to wonder if this, what he’s doing here, is what he would have chosen if he’d had a level head at the time, if the agents who’d picked him up had been something else, something nice and normal like CIA MI6 KGB, endless neat little letters and numbers for twisty bureaucracies playing speed chess with people and paperwork. 

That’s not where he’d ended up, wounded and paralyzed and fucked up somewhere ( _Syria_ , his brain supplies, _you were in Syria_ , but he doesn’t think about it too hard). He’d ended up in a smooth, quiet, white-walled place with a doctor who was smiling too perfectly to be fully calm. 

Scott rolls his shoulders and cracks his back without thinking about it, and if the woman at the next table notices his spine doesn’t pop so much as it clinks (bullet fragment on bullet fragment, almost, not quite, something not so hollow) she doesn’t turn to him, not even out of the corner of her eyes. 

“Are you going to drink that?” Lydia asks as she slides into the chair across from him, pointing with one slim finger at his untouched coffee. Her nails are a sort of bronze-red today, he notices in a detached way. 

“No,” he admits. 

“I didn’t think so,” Lydia says, pulling it across the table and taking a sip, watching something over his shoulder, down the street, towards the water. 

“You here for a report? Because I haven’t finished it.”

“No, just to find out how you’re doing. Sensors indicated you were shot three days ago, so Hale sent me out to check on you.”

“Fine, patched myself up.”

Lydia looks over the edge of her coffee mug to stare at him, her eyes like flint. 

The thing is, she probably knows. Lydia knows more than the rest of them, even sub-director Hale, even though it’s not clear how exactly she does. It’s occurred to Scott before that she could be a shadow, like he thinks Stiles may be. Raised within the agency, a non-person without a name or a number or a paper trail, a curl of fog with no sharply defined history to speak of. 

“Boyd will be joining you later today,” Lydia says, changing topics because she knows he won’t say anything else, won’t give Stiles up. 

(Scott doesn’t even know exactly who Stiles works for, although he knows enough about the agency that it’s got to be SHIELD.)

“Where are we headed?”

“You’re staying here,” Lydia says, and pulls a phone out of her pocket, handing it to him. “Congratulations, you’re a CIA contractor for the next week.”

“Ugh,” Scott wrinkles his nose, scrolls through the docket. “Too much paperwork.”

“Lucky for you it’s not a head of state wet job, just a regular old shady character.”

“Yeah,” Scott mutters. “Lucky me.”

(Scott was embedded with the CIA paramilitary unit when they first put him back together, as a double agent. He pretty much hated every second of it, so he was more than happy to come back to the carrier, even if it meant that he had to leave Allison. He left a tiny carved wolf from a job in Irkutsk on her dresser, but that was it. Just a small grey wolf made of Siberian pine to remind her that he’d been there at all.)

\---

Scott goes running along the water the next morning, leaving Boyd still sleeping in the safe house. Boyd’s not much of a runner, prefers the gym to the street. 

He’s almost to an ornate mosque jutting out on a promontory into the water when Stiles slips out of the early morning gloom and joins him, matching his stride. Scott knows that Stiles is the better runner, longer legs and less bulk and way better endurance, but he doesn’t do anything to pull ahead. They stop at the mosque to watch a couple of old men casting lines for the first fish of the day as people trickle out of morning prayer, stopping to pick up shoes or talk to the fishermen. 

“You stalking me now?” Scott asks.

“Nah, you wouldn’t know if I was stalking you,” Stiles says, and it’s rather light for the truth behind it. Scott is a good shot (a great shot, the best, steady hands and sharp eyes) and just about the best wet boy you could get your hands on, but he’s not the shadow, the changeling that Stiles is. Stiles doesn’t kill, Stiles takes. He ghosts. 

“Then what are you doing here?” Scott looks away from Stiles, watches as a street cat creeps on bent legs, low to the ground, towards a bucket of fish one of the old men is using. The man turns at the last moment and stomps his foot, shooing the cat away. It waits under a bench, tail flicking, no doubt planning a second attempt already. 

“I’m here with Lydia,” Stiles says simply, because of course he is. Attached at the hip, the terror twins, etc. Stiles and Lydia make quite the duo. There are whispers of an agent called Gemini in certain circles, who can be in two places at once. In reality, it’s just Stiles and Lydia and their ability to function as one exceptionally lethal unit. 

Stiles starts running again and Scott follows, until they’ve wound up through the streets to what Scott thinks is a safe house until Stiles pulls a key out of his sneaker and Scott finds himself in a warm, airy apartment that’s much too personally decorated to be anything but a home. 

“This your place?” Scott asks, actually surprised. He’d say it’s a bit too kitschy for Stiles’ tastes, but he actually has no idea what Stiles’ taste is like in relation to interior decoration. 

“Lydia’s. She said it was her 18th birthday present.”

“I thought-“

“She was. Parents’ will, she just had to hit the whole ‘being legal’ thing. She hates it though, it’s kind of funny. I think she’d torch the place and redecorate but it’s the only thing she has left.”

Stiles says this all like it’s a joke, but his lips are the only part of his face that smiles. Scott stares around at the walls for a moment (a smiling couple, two dogs wet from playing in a pond, paintings of shapes that all seem to be done by the same artist) before suddenly Stiles is in his personally space, a palm ghosting over Scott’s stiches, his mouth inches from Scott’s lips. 

“I’ll tear out my stiches,” Scott points out.

“I can fix them,” Stiles says, and then they’re walking as one through the apartment, Stiles walking backwards and pulling him like he has eyes in the back of his head, until they end up spread across the dining table (leaving streaks in the dust that has accumulated on the top of it), knocking a thing of fake flowers to the floor.

Stiles’ lips are hot, cauterizing promises into Scott’s skin that he can’t hear, just words, mindless words that he presses against Scott’s back, up and down his spine, across the scars that had ripped apart and obscured the phases of the moon that he’d gotten tattooed down his back when he was in college. 

When his stiches do rip Stiles just lays a protective hand across them and whispers into Scott’s ear instead –

_It’s ok I’ll fix you I’ve got this I’m sorry you don’t need any more scars please please please_

\- and leaves a smear of bloody hand print across Scott’s stomach when he comes, jerking, his fingers curling. 

True to his word, Stiles does patch him up afterwards, and after that it’s long enough before he sees Stiles again that all he’s left with is a knot of scar tissue. 

\---

“Wind at 6mph out of the northwest.”

Boyd is just close enough that when Scott moves his arm his elbow brushes Boyd’s shoulder, a simple movement that’s oddly comforting. 

“How are you doing on line of sight?”

“Target’s in my scope,” Scott says, breathing with the wind. The man is standing on the top deck of his yacht like an idiot, flirting with a girl half his age. Erica had delivered this particular hit, her smirk saying that she’d get a great kick out of this particular scumbag not being around anymore. Erica comes from a long line of wet work, and it shows. Her brand of justice is something that Scott was made to come to terms with, she was born into it. At first, he’d resented her for it. Now he wishes that he was at peace with his hits, and he’s aware that what he feels in her direction now is jealousy. 

Scott doesn’t know who this man is, just that the agency wants him dead (SHIELD, rather, the hits always come from up top), so when Scott breathes out in one long stream as he pulls the trigger, he doesn’t think of much.

The man drops, his champagne glass shattering on the deck. A mess of brain and blood ends up on the girl, who starts screaming and screaming, curling in on herself and clawing at her face. Scott can’t hear it, but he can see it through his scope. He grimaces, hating himself in that moment, and it’s not until he feels Boyd’s hand on his back that he looks up, face hard and angry. 

“It’s not worth it,” Boyd tells him, and Scott strips the M110 down in record time, hands flying. The gun feels strange in his hands in pieces, almost alien, and Scott knows that he’s getting close to another break. This happens every so often, when some part of him fractures and he goes and holes himself up in some Serbian mountainside village. 

“Hey,” Boyd says when they get to the bus station a couple of kilometers away. “You need to cut and run?”

Scott shakes his head, twisting his fingers around the straps of his pack. 

“I’m ok. I’ll be back on grid in a few days.”

Boyd gives him a long hard look like he can see right though Scott’s bullshit (he probably can), but he nods and heads off in direction of a bus. Scott’s exit from this particular fandango is to hitchhike through France to Switzerland and get a plane out of Zurich. Not a bad way to get there, considering the amount of time Scott has spent on cramped buses and trains, rattling across continental Europe. 

The walk to the motorway takes 47 minutes by his watch. He thinks about the girl on the boat the whole way, until somehow her face morphs to Lydia’s and Stiles’ and then of course Allison’s, because eventually somehow all his hits come back to Allison, which is going to really get him into trouble at some point. 

He sticks his hand out, used to this by now, so he doesn’t mind the wait until a new little Fiat 500 pulls up next to him, cherry red and decked out in German plates. He’s been thinking about her so much that when he sees Allison in the driver’s seat it takes him a moment to realize that it’s extremely weird that she’s here. 

“Scott?” She seems just as confused as he is. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” He asks, eyes wide. 

“You first,” she says, and there’s that challenge in her voice that he missed. 

“Backpacking,” he says, because it’s the easiest lie, as long as Allison doesn’t look at the Spanish passport tucked into his back pocket that most certainly does not have his name and real information on it. “You?”

“Traveling,” and the way she says it, so easily, pings something in Scott’s mind. It’s the same tone he’d just used. 

It’s a lie. A very, very good lie. A trained lie, specifically. Scott reaches in through the open window and pops open the glove compartment just as Allison’s face freezes up. When he comes up with the Italian passport he looks up to see that she’s got a gun trained at his head. He stares at her for a moment, both of their faces totally blank, before he leans on the bottom of the window and flips open the passport. 

“Anna Maria Gallo,” Scott reads. “You don’t look like much of an Anna Maria. CIA?”

Allison is staring at him like he’s a puzzle, but she lowers the gun and tucks in into some hidden space between her seat and the center consol. He hands the passport back, watching the way she tucks it into her jacket to see if she’s got anything else on her that could be a weapon.

“I was supposed to shadow you, back then, my superiors thought you were doubling,” she says quietly. “Everything else though, that was ok.”

“Ok?”

“You know what I mean. We thought you’d gotten burned.”

“Were you supposed to sleep with me?”

“That,” Allison says fiercely, “was fully my choice.” 

They stare at each other for another hard, long moment, Scott counting heartbeats, before Allison leans over and unlocks the door with a sigh.

“Get in, I’m not leaving you to die of cheese and wine overdose in the south of France.”

“That actually sounds really good,” Scott says nonchalantly as he gets in, wondering what the hell he was thinking when hitchhiking sounded good – he’s way too tall for European cars as much as the buses and trains. 

Mile markers go sweeping past, and Scott counts those instead. It dully occurs to him that Allison is going west, not east, but he doesn’t say anything.

“So,” Allison says after a while, cautious, like she’s poking at the grey wolf that Scott left on her dresser. “You go off grid?”

“No, your superiors were right,” he says, and he sees Allison’s hands jerk just a bit, tighten on the wheel, and her eyes dart to him. “I’m SHIELD.” 

To Allison’s credit, she keeps driving smoothly like he hasn’t just said that he works for the nastiest of the nasty. 

\---

They end up in a hostel in Paris (overpriced as only Paris hostels can be, but then again, they’re both on company budgets, although Allison is going to have an assload of paperwork when she gets home because no one ever said the CIA was good about expenses). 

Back when they were doing whatever it was (‘ok’ isn’t a ringing endorsement) Scott, in his typical stupid puppy love way, had said that one day he’d take her to Paris and they’d stroll up the Champs-Élysées, staring at the lights. Allison had been delighted at the idea.

However, by the way she’d navigated the streets of the 20th arrondissement and had a friendly chat with the guy who ran the hostel, he knew that she’d been here before. Probably many times. 

“Stationed in deep cover at the embassy here,” she says as way of explanation, and of course she had been.

“I feel like Brad Pitt,” Scott grouses as he drops his bag on the floor of their tiny double room. It makes an audible thunk, which makes Allison look over at it. “M110.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Brad Pitt or the rifle?”

“Brad Pitt.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith?”

Allison just stares at him for a second before she starts laughing, flopping back one of the beds and wiping at her face. 

“Don’t expect any house running sex,” she says. 

“I wasn’t.” He really wasn’t, and it’s easier to say than mentioning that he’s fucking a shadow when he’s drunk and broken. 

They walk through the cemetery a few blocks from the hostel and sit on the grass lawn with a view of the Eiffel Tower, trading a pack of Kinder back and forth. It’s late enough in the year that there are leaves lazily swirling across the cobblestone paths. 

“So,” Allison says, snapping a piece of chocolate between her fingers. “You’re SHIELD.”

“Well, the agency division within, but yes.”

“How long?”

“They got their hands on me when I was 24.”

“Little bit late, for SHIELD.”

“I was in the Marines, remember?”

Allison looks at him out of the corner of her eye, like he’s a puzzle again.

“I assumed, between our car ride and here, that you’d been lying. It wasn’t a cover?”

“No, I was really in the Marines. I enlisted out of high school, SHIELD got me right out of the Marines.”

“The scar on your back, SHIELD or Marines?”

“IED, and SHIELD doctors.”

Allison makes a little humming noise, and then sighs, turning to face him. 

“I was tasked with you only as a shadow. My directions were to actually not even interact with you, outside of the coffee shop. When I said that everything else was done of my own volition, it was.”

(Allison had been working at a coffee shop – _cover_ , Scott realizes – when they’d met.)

“Oh,” is all Scott can say. “You end up in trouble?”

“No,” Allison says, shrugging. “They thought it was a better idea anyway. And I had an excuse to stop pretending like I knew what I was doing with an espresso machine.”

“You’re probably multilingual and can fire just about any weapon you get your hand on, but you can’t work an espresso machine,” Scott says, smiling to himself. 

“Quad, and I can strip your M110 faster than you can.”

“Well, I can make espresso.” 

Allison laughs, without a hint of malice, just a real, honest laugh, and Scott leans back on his elbows, grinning over at her. There’s a breeze in her hair and Scott is reminded that above everything, he really, honestly cared about Allison. Cares, probably, with the way she pops up in his mind. 

But Allison was perfect in ways he never was, and now instead he fits together with Stiles in all their broken place, in a strange sort of symbiotic relationship based in blood and bruises. 

Somehow though, in his head, the two tend to slide together and blur around their edges. 

\---

They fly back to the states together, and when they land at Dulles Scott is in no way surprised to see Lydia in arrivals, considering he’s now been AWOL for a week, doing stupid, tourist shit in Paris with Allison.

(They finally took that trip, just not how Scott had expected it.)

However, she’s surprised to see him as she gets an armful (and then a lipful) of Allison.

“Oh,” is all Scott says, his mouth hanging open slightly. Lydia is still staring at him like a deer in the headlights, and Allison is looking between the two of them, confused. 

“This is your Scott?” Lydia asks Allison. “ _This_ Scott? Scott your ex?”

“Yeah, why?” Allison asks, drawing back from Lydia a bit. “You two know each other?”

“Well,” Scott says, “this is awkward.”

“What’s - oh,” Allison says, and her face shuts down, neutral and smooth. “Seemingly I’m being seduced by half of SHIELD.”

The look on Lydia’s face is worth it, because as far as Scott knows, it’s the first time in her life she’s been made, and she’s been SHIELD since day one. It’s a beautiful moment. 

Scott leaves them to figure it out (he knows they will), and stays in Maryland for two days before flying back to San Francisco, to the only house that’s actually his, his real name is on the deed and he has a normal key to the front door and everything.

He puts the M110 away (the things you can get through security when you have SHIELD tech, it’s a wonderful thing) in the basement, checks that the alarm hasn’t been triggered since he left months and seasons and heartbeats ago, and then nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees Stiles at the kitchen table, face pale and shirt bloody from the long gouge across his collarbones. Knife, Scott’s brain automatically supplies. Probably down to the bone. 

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Scott says, and Stiles manages a weak grin. 

“You got a first aid kit?” 

“Of course.” 

Stiles sits at the bar and Scott works between his open legs, hips bracketed by Stiles’ knees. It’s not deep, but it’s starting to get infected and it did hit the bone, so Scott gives him antibiotics and secretly vows to drag him to the doctor’s if it’s not better in two days.

If Stiles is still around in two days.

“You know your partner and my ex are dating?” Scott asks, after Stiles is put back together and they’re sitting on the back porch drinking cheap beer. The sun is setting, and it’s making their world glow orange and red, the shadows dark and long. 

“I knew she was seeing someone,” Stiles says, and Scott isn’t sure he wants to know how Stiles got that information. “Didn’t realize it was your ex.”

They’re silent for a while, and then Stiles gets up, setting down his beer and climbing into Scott’s lap, pulling his shirt off up over his head.

(Scott is, in that moment, profoundly glad that his house backs up on a tree line and he doesn’t have any peeping neighbors.) 

Stiles tastes like sparks and copper, like always, and for some reason Scott is reminded of the first time they did this, when they were both bleeding and bruised and it was messy and frantic, leaving streaks of red on the wall that they were fucking against. It’s a strange memory, something that Scott feels like he half made up, except he knows that his memory is excellent and knows that Stiles has the same memory, just with different wounds and breaks. He’d had alcohol in his system, just like Moscow (always Moscow) and it plays havoc with the system of lights that makes up his memory, like a constellation on a cloudy night. 

“Hey,” Scott says, breaking away for a moment, because that memory had triggered another, a question that’s been quietly pulsing at the back of his head for a long time, “you’re like Lydia, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, voice rough, “I am.” His lips are bright red and he runs his tongue along them before reaching around Scott to tap his back, fingers dancing down his spine, perfectly. T6 to L2.

“And you have enhancements,” Stiles murmurs, close to Scott’s ear. “Every time you arch your back they crack, and it sounds like a trigger pull. Paralyzed?”

“For three days, according to SHIELD,” Scott breathes out, eyes closed. He can feel where Stiles’ fingers had sailed over his skin, so close to the metal below. 

“Ok,” Stiles says, and surges in to kiss him. “Ok, secrets over now.” 

The last bit of broken shard slips together, and Scott runs his hands down Stiles’ sides, marveling at the warmth of the skin beneath his palms, unbroken.


End file.
